Phantom update · 12:18pm Nov 6th, 2022
Here I assumed I understood how Fimfic's system worked, but hey, you know what they say about assumptions. Turns out, I have no clue.
Anyway, I published an unfinished chapter of Agate's Vigil by accident some time ago, then unpublished it immediately. Now, when I finished it and published it for real, it seems that there's been no notification to anyone at all. I'm guessing it is to prevent exploiting the system, or something? Which is something that I don't really fully understand, since my assumption was that having lots of readers/interaction is what brings a story to the featured box, but apparently that's not entirely the case - instead, an update automatically bumps it up?
Well, whatever. This is mostly just to inform those of you that missed it - yes, the latest chapter is out. Sorry for taking so long.
I'm very excited to read the new chapter, so thank you for writing it and thanks also for making this post to point it out!
I don't know if it's against the rules or not to unpublish and rerelease the chapter as a new one, but it might be worth doing if it's not breaking a rule, just to ensure people see it, as it isn't showing up as updated in my tracked stories list either.
The feature box is complicated... First we should look at the rules for update notifications.
They only ever go out the first time you publish a chapter. If you unpub and repub, no notifications, anyone that doesn't happen to look at the story will have no clue. Same for editing after publication. When there is that first-publication, it sends notifications (e-mail and so on for people tracking the story) and bumps the story to the top of the 'updated' list.
For the feature box, though...
The first seven slots are reserved for popular activity or whatever the trigger is (rating/comments seems to be a part of it, not just people looking at it)... and of course have an extra caveat that reduces a story's ability to get there, the longer it has been since it was first there. In essence, you generally get the top seven slots once in the lifetime of the story, though it may last a couple days or move around a bit.
The bottom three slots are for "previously featured stories that were recently updated". If your story was featured in the past, chances are you'll hit those bottom three slots every time you publish a new chapter. It's not always the case, though.
... That "accidentally published an unfinished chapter" would be why I use Google Docs for my writing and editing processes, actually.
And one of these days, I need to take Agate's Vigil off my "Read It Later" list and actually read it. To be fair, though, last time I did that to any story was something like a year ago, so my Read It Later list hosts some... 10,396 unread chapters across 607 stories (approx. 41M words).
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Nice. My own is at 84M words, heh.
Overall, that sounds mostly fair, I guess, except for the part that Lapsus pointed out:
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Now that just sounds broken.
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Yeah... It shows as updated the first time you publish it, but the site assumes you aren't accidentally publishing unfinished chapters, so later repubs of the actual finished chapter won't trigger the updates. I happen to be doing an in-place rewrite of one of my stories... I could delete chapters and create new ones in their place (as far as I know, there's no rules against that, as long as it's not being used just to bump the story- "bump chapters" are explicitly against the rules), but if I do that, I'll lose all the comments from the original version... So I update it and then tell everyone about it in the A/N of the next chapter of the "unrewrite" going up from my backlog. When I run out of those, I'll probably switch to blog posts.